A Guide for Dealing With Flaky Friends

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Symptoms: You both agree to meet at In-N-Out to get burgers at noon on Saturday before you go to a movie. It is now 12:45 and you are STARVING and the movie starts in 15 minutes and her ass is not there. You’ve been texting her “WHERE R U” every five minutes since 12:15. She texted that she was leaving the house at noon, just as you sat down. You are furious and also not surprised—she is constantly wildly late, so late it’s as if she lives in a separate time zone. This is, what? The third time she’s done this to you in as many months? And it’s not like you’re some crazy stickler for punctuality! You’d be fine with five, 10, 15—heck, 20 minutes—but now YOU’RE GOING TO MISS THE MOVIE, and wtf, she lives less than a mile away from In-N-Out. What the hell is taking so long?

Diagnosis: The White Rabbit is either unbelievably bad with basic time management, a dawdler (as in, she has a hard time getting ready and out the door of her house, or leaving social situations without stopping to chat with 18 people), or…she might not be very good at thinking about other people. Let us assume, because she attends school or work and has not yet failed out or been fired, that your flaky friend understands basic time management. That leaves “she’s a dawdler” or “she’s not thinking about other people” as the only two explanations.

Treatment: The strategy for both the dawdler and the self-involved, chronically late friend is the same: Wait for her only until you become annoyed. Then leave without her. Casually. For me, this is almost exactly 20 minutes after an agreed-upon time. After 20 minutes and one “dude where are u?” text, take off. Do the thing you were going to do, but without her. Or do something else—she’s kept you waiting long enough. The White Rabbit knows that almost everyone else shows up to things on time, and expects you to be there at the appointed place, at the appointed time, waiting. She gets away with this because most people wait for her. You do not have to wait for her. She can text you when she finally gets to wherever you were supposed to meet. If she’s upset, lay out your logic: “You were really late, so I ate already.” If you try the waiting-then-calmly-leaving-as-soon-as-you-get-annoyed strategy a few times, you’ll notice something: You will be less irritated with your friend, because you are honoring your own time and doing what you wanted to do. And your friend, if she really wants to hang out, will start showing up a lot closer to the scheduled time, because now she knows you won’t wait for her.

4. The Indifferent One
The FF Who Is Not As Invested in the Friendship As You Are

It has to be said. Sometimes someone is just not as interested in pursuing a friendship as you are. It happens. It sucks when it happens, but it happens.

Symptoms: You text to ask what this person is doing Friday night. She texts back that she’s not sure yet. You ask her if she wants to sleep over. She says she thinks she can? Maybe? What time? You say 7 PM, and she says “Great.” Friday evening rolls around, and she’s MIA; no calls, no texts, and oh hello! At 9 PM, you see an Instagram of her…hanging out with two of your other mutual friends. Cool. She’s done this before—she also said she’d meet you to go thrifting and then didn’t show up. When you asked her about it, she shrugged and said, “I had to do something for my mom.”

Diagnosis: This FF is not acting very much like a friend. She is treating you badly, and that is not OK. It’s possible something is going on with her that you don’t know about, but it is also possible that she is less interested in being friends with you than you are with her.

Treatment: This is a hard situation to be in, and it can be sad, but it’s something that’s happened to a lot of people (me included!), and you can get through it! If it seems too confrontational or awkward to ask this FF directly why she is treating you the way she is, to deal with this, you could try giving off a sudden, radio silence when it comes to invitations to hang out. No more texts about Friday night sleepovers, no more invites to go thrifting. See if she invites you to do anything. It’s possible that she’ll come back around and want to hang out after you stop inviting her to lots of things, but it’s also possible she won’t. In this case, flakiness was her way of moving on from a friendship. HER LOSS!

You don’t have to put up with flaky behavior from friends you love, my babes. You also don’t have to cut flaky friends out of your life. You can accept them! Love them for who they are! …and make sure they know how to treat you (an equally important member of this friendship), too. ♦

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I’m glad this article doesn’t encourage people to drop their flaky friends and instead examines the reason behind that flakiness. This was a really good read!

One thing I think it important for people in general to keep in mind is that people with ADHD are probably going to be way less reliable when it comes to getting to places on time or remembering events you’ve planned together.

A great way of dealing with this is meeting up with them at their house before going out to do something because it takes away a lot of the overwhelming aspects of the situation and removes a lot of the small steps they’ll have to remember before they leave. Plus, they’ll be encouraged to hurry if you’re right there, honking your car horn in their driveway or standing at their doorway with your boots on, ready to go.

Alternatively, meet up at places where someone can enjoy hanging out alone anyway, then tell your friend to come earlier than you’d tell anyone else to come. If they arrive late, they’ll really be on time, and if by some miracle they arrive early, they can just chill out and wait on YOU for once.

I’m really glad that this article doesn’t promote just dumping friends for cancelling on you. I’m chronically ill and HATE that I have to cancel plans on people and regularly beat myself up for it and it makes me FEEL like a flake, but my health is a priority and I can’t always tell when it’s going to flare up and stop me doing stuff until the last minute. And people aren’t always comfortable talking openly about their health issues (which can very often be invisible), so just because you don’t KNOW about something doesn’t mean it isn’t a real issue for them. It’s just something to bare in mind.

I kind of am like the first three. Mostly the introverted, but I’m also too busy and I am really bad at planning. It’s really annoying because it’s really hard to change and I often disappoint people and I miss school a lot. A tip for dealing with the introverted friend: sometimes you might want to agree beforehand on how long you will hang out together. That way it won’t feel like she will be drained of all her energy while you will just be together for an hour, and she can also prepare herself.
For the white rabbit: if you meet up somewhere, you could agree on that she lets you know when she actually leaves (after having already agreed on a time anyway), and leaving when you know she actually has left as well.

It is so great to see an article which deals sympathetically with flaky friends rather than totally dismissing them as bad friends! I say this as queen-of-the-excuse-queens, 90% of the people who know me well fully realise that I’m not actually conveniently ‘just tired’ when we should be meeting up. Sadly, my bouts of not being able to face leaving my room/other people don’t even try to come at convenient times, and when I cancel plans its rarely personal but more down to a sense of not being able to deal with the world. I should really try and communicate this with my friends more effectively but it can be tricky to say ‘I don’t want to see you right now because I don’t want to see anyone, and I will be awful company if I do manage to haul myself outside’ in a good way. Anyway, I appreciate how my friends somehow manage to pick this up and are understanding of my occasional social hopelessness.

Omg I am the excuse queen to a T. Sometimes right before I go to a party or even just to a friend’s house, I get this really nervous feeling in my stomach and I turn into an anxious, grouchy hot mess and don’t want to deal with anyone. It’s weird because as soon as I get to wherever I’m supposed to go, I’m totally fine, horrible feelings are 100% gone. Sometimes I can ignore these feelings but sometimes they take over and I end up canceling. I always feel really guilty after but I’m lucky my friends are so understanding <3

I can totally relate; I have some pretty Flakey Friends (mm just makes me think of the chocolate). My ex-bestfriend, who i am still friends with, though not as close, would almost always treat me as the last option. I would ask her if she wanted to hang out and she would say mm maybe. Then if a better opportunity came up, like hanging out with other people, she’d would not get back to me and i’d have to ask her again. This time the answer from her would be no, i’m hanging out with Lola/Jessie/etc. Most of the time these people would be ones who did DRUGS, which is not something i enjoy doing. SO in the end our friendship was clear: she chose drugs over me. Yehh that felt pretty shit to realise but i decided not to totally drop her because most of my friends were also her friends and i had a fun time when i hung out with her one on one. So now i am friendly towards her but i am careful not to get too upset if she doesn’t hang out with me. most of the time i let her make the first move to catch up (which is hardly EVER) but when we do hang out it’s the greatest.

this is why i like how this article says not to drop your friends… learn to LIVE with it and get over it (yeh, harsh, but it works)–it’s what i did
<33

I’m so glad to see an article about this because it’s something I’ve been going through lately and it’s so annoying. Last year for my birthday, I was having a party and I invited a few of my friends. Everyone said they could come so I was expecting everyone there. Everyone did show up except for one girl. After waiting 30 minutes to eat and sending her a text asking where she was, I got no response. Two hours later she texted me and said she forgot. Yeah..sure.

In my opinion I only hang out with certain people, mainly to avoid the last scenario. It hurts, it sucks and I just don’t want to have to go through that. As for the friends I do see regularly, the only main symptom there is the chronically late. Ughhh it’s literally so annoying, so yeah, maybe I should ask them to stop dawdling? Usually it’s a group thing so waiting for them is already a given…

I’m actually flaky friend #1. There’s this one friend that I really like hanging out with and she is my first friend in 5 years (not a joke, i find it nearly impossible to make friends because I am EXTREMELY introverted/shy/insecure) I really like her and when we hang out at school its awesome and I’ve gotten REALLY excited that I FINALLY have a friend but she recently invited me to hang out on Saturday. I thought she meant to her house and I was SO happy but then she said that she wants us to hang out at the beach with two 22 year old guys (my friend and I are both 16) and they’re planning on getting drunk and high. When she said that I got really scared because 1. I CANNOT talk to guys, especially older guys 2. my friend told me one of those guys got her high and then had sex with her, but she still wants to hang out with him 3. I don’t want to get drunk or high and have them take advantage of me 4. I’ve never smoked weed and if/when I do I want it to be with people I trust and know. I really want to hang out with her but I will probably end up canceling because of the aforementioned. I feel like such a wimp!

I feel this deep in my soul. I’ve been (admittedly) a bit cranky today due to being ditched by two friends just as I was about to leave to go meet them (they didn’t even have good excuses!). I’e been a bit worried lately that their excuses and fickleness has become an impassable issue in the friendship, so this article is helping me a lot.